“How many sex scenes?” is a perennial question in the National Novel Writing Month Erotica Forum. Meaning, how many sex scenes should an erotica or erotic romance novel have? Just this week, I saw the same question asked on a private Facebook group and felt compelled to write this blog post with the answer and an explanation.

People frequently make broad assumptions about what it is I write. Friends, family, and acquaintances snicker about my “porn”. Romance writer colleagues imbued with the cadence of traditional romance often bandy about the term “erotica” as if to signal the ugly otherness of erotic romance.

So I will attempt to answer the provocative question What is erotica? and by doing so answer corollary questions about misunderstood erotic-like literary variations: Erotic romance, steamy romance, smut, porn, and Romantica®. Continue reading →

Finally, finally I was able to convert The General’s Wife: An American Revolutionary Tale into an epub edition! I had to wait until the end of its enrollment in Amazon’s KDP Select Program, because books in that program have to be exclusive to Amazon.

It’s June 14th and in the United States we’re celebrating Flag Day! I have a special promotion for June (Flag Day month) and July (Independence Day month). See the end of this post!

I generally write historical erotic romance, although I have also written contemporary, mythological, and Steampunk. But my comfort zone is historicals because I’m a historian and, I suppose, I’ve internally fetishized history to a certain extent.

Remember Torchwood? The Dr. Who spin-off show set in Cardiff? There’s definite sexual chemistry between Captain Jack Harkness and Gwen Cooper, and we the viewers so want something to happen, but we know Gwen already has a boyfriend who is a nice guy and she can’t just have an affair without consequences then suddenly…

Beginning writers are often advised to “write what you know,” that way words and stories and emotions will resound authentically. The general public has glommed on to this aphorism and often conflates “write what you know” with “write your actual lived experience”. Erotica and erotic romance writers especially fall victim to this definition. We get a lot of “heh, heh” “snicker, snicker” at parties and such, because of course we’ve all done every blessed thing our characters have done.

When I was thinking about what to write for Naughty Flings, an anthology with the theme of springtime, the quintessential springtime myth came to mind, i.e., the story of Persephone. I decided to revisit this myth, but to put a new spin on it, which proved pretty easy.